corded
upon it; but above all, like a monarch dominating his subjects, was the
ineradicable aroma of Monday's kipper.

On this particular evening Galvin House seemed more than ever grey and
depressing. Patricia found herself wondering if God had really made
all these people in His own image. They seemed so petty, so ungodlike.
The way they regarded their food, as it was handed to them, suggested
that they were for ever engaged in a comparison of what they paid with
what they received. Did God make people in His own image and then
leave the rest to them? Was that where free will came in?

"----lonely!"

The word seemed to crash in upon her thoughts with explosive force.
Someone had used it--whom she did not know, or in what relation. It
brought her back to earth and Galvin House. "Lonely," that was at the
root of her depression. She was an object of pity among her
fellow-boarders. It was intolerable! She understood why girls "did
things" to escape from such surroundings and such fox-pity.

Had she been a domestic servant she could have hired a soldier, that is
before the war. Had she been a typist or a shop-girl--well, there were
the park and tubes and things where gallant youth approached fair
maiden. No, she was just a girl who could not do these things, and in
consequence became the pitied of the Miss Wangles and the Mrs.
Mosscrop-Smythes of Bayswater.

She was quite content to be manless, she did not like men, at least not
the sort she had encountered. There were Boltons and Cordals in
plenty. There were the "Haven't-we-met-before?" kind too, the hunters
who seemed cheerfully to get out at the wrong station, or pay twopence
on a bus for a penny fare in order to pursue some face that had
attracted their roving eye.

She sighed involuntarily at the ugliness of it all, this cheapening of
the things worthy of reverence and respect. She looked across at Miss
Sikkum, whose short skirts and floppy hats had involved her in many
unconventional adventures that one glance at her face had corrected as
if by magic. A back view of Miss Sikkum was deceptive.

Suddenly Patricia made a resolve. Had she paused to think she would
have seen the danger; but she was by nature impulsive, and the
conversation she had overheard had angered and humiliated her.

Her resolve synchronised with the arrival of the sweet stage. Turning
to Mrs. Craske-Morton she remarked casually, "I shall not be in to
dinner to-morrow nig